E.E. 'Doc' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus: The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne (3 page)

‘That brings us up to today. As a last resort, because there wasn’t anything else left, I started testing for trans-uranics, and there it was. A stable – almost stable, I mean – isotope; up where no almost-stable isotopes are supposed to exist. Up where I would’ve bet my last shirt no such isotope could
possibly
exist.

‘Well, I was trying to electrolyze it out when the fireworks started. The solution started to fizz over, so I grabbed the beaker – fast. The wires dropped onto the steam-bath and the whole outfit, except the beaker, took off out of the window at six or eight times the speed of sound and in a straight line, without dropping a foot in as far as I could keep it in sight with a pair of
good
binoculars. And my hunch is that it’s still going. That’s what happened. It’s enough to knock any physicist into an outside loop, and with my one-cylinder brain I got to thinking about it and simply didn’t come to until after ten o’clock. All I can say is, I’m sorry and I love you. As much as I ever did
or could. More, if possible. And I always will. Can you let it go – this time?’

‘Dick … oh, Dick!’

There was more – much more – but eventually Seaton mounted his motorcycle and Dorothy walked beside him down to the street. A final kiss and the man drove away.

After the last faint glimmer of red tail-light had disappeared in the darkness Dorothy made her way to her room, breathing a long and slightly tremulous, but supremely happy sigh.

Seaton’s childhood had been spent in the mountains of northern Idaho, a region not much out of the pioneer stage and offering few inducements to intellectual effort. He could only dimly remember his mother, a sweet, gentle woman with a great love for books; but his father, ‘Big Fred’ Seaton, a man of but one love, almost filled the vacant place. Fred owned a quarter-section of virgin white-pine timber, and in that splendid grove he established a home for himself and his motherless boy.

In front of the cabin lay a level strip of meadow, beyond which rose a magnificent, snow-covered peak that caught the earliest rays of the sun.

This mountain, dominating the entire countryside, was to the boy a challenge, a question, and a secret. He accepted the challenge, scaling its steep sides, hunting its forests, and fishing its streams. He toughened his sturdy young body by days and nights upon its slopes. He puzzled over the question of its origin as he lay upon the needles under some monster pine. He put staggering questions to his father; and when in books he found some partial answers his joy was complete. He discovered some of the mountain’s secrets then – some of the laws that govern the world of matter, some of the beginnings man’s mind has made toward understanding the hidden mechanism of Nature’s great simplicity.

Each taste of knowledge whetted his appetite for more. Books! Books! More and more he devoured them; finding in them meat for the hunger that filled him, answers to the questions that haunted him.

After Big Fred lost his life in the forest fire that destroyed his property, Seaton turned his back upon the woods forever. He worked his way through high school and won a scholarship at college. Study was a pleasure to his keen mind; and he had ample time for athletics, for which his backwoods life had fitted him outstandingly. He went out for everything,
and excelled in football and tennis.

In spite of the fact that he had to work his way he was popular with his college mates, and his popularity was not lessened by an almost professional knowledge of sleight-of-hand.

His long, strong fingers could move faster than the eye could follow, and many a lively college party watched in vain to see how he did what he did.

After graduating with highest honors as a physical chemist, he was appointed research fellow in a great university, where he won his Ph.D. by brilliant research upon rare metals – his dissertation having the lively title of ‘Some Observations upon Certain Properties of Certain Metals, Including Certain Trans-Uranic Elements.’ Soon afterward he had his own room in the Rare Metals Laboratory, in Washington, D.C.

He was a striking figure – well over six feet in height, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, a man of tremendous physical strength. He did not let himself grow soft in his laboratory job, but kept in hard, fine condition. He spent most of his spare time playing tennis, swimming and motor-cycling.

As a tennis-player he quickly became well known in Washington sporting and social circles. During the District Tournament he met M. Reynolds Crane – known to only a very few intimates as ‘Martin’ – the multi-millionaire explorer-archaeologist-sportsman who was then District singles champion. Seaton had cleared the lower half of the list and played Crane in the final round. Crane succeeded in retaining his title, but only after five of the most grueling, most bitterly contested sets ever seen in Washington.

Impressed by Seaton’s powerful, slashing game, Crane suggested that they train together as a doubles team. Seaton accepted instantly, and the combination was highly effective.

Practicing together almost daily, each came to know the other as a man of his own kind, and a real friendship grew up between them. When the Crane–Seaton team had won the District Championship and had gone to the semi-finals of the National before losing, the two were upon a footing which most brothers could have envied. Their friendship was such that neither Crane’s immense wealth and high social standing nor Seaton’s comparative poverty and lack of standing offered any obstacle whatever. Their comradeship was the same, whether they were in Seaton’s modest room or in Crane’s palatial yacht.

Crane had never known the lack of anything that money could buy. He had inherited his fortune and had little or nothing to do with its management, preferring to delegate that job to financial specialists. However, he was in no sense an idle rich man with no purpose in life. As well as being an explorer and an archaeologist and a sportsman, he was also an engineer – a good one – and a rocket-instrument man second to none in the world.

The old Crane estate in Chevy Chase was now, of course, Martin’s, and he had left it pretty much as it was. He had, however, altered
one room, the library, and it was now peculiarly typical of the man. It was a large room, very long, with many windows. At one end was a huge fireplace, before which Crane often sat with his long legs outstretched, studying one or several books from the cases close at hand. The essential furnishings were of a rigid simplicity, but the treasures he had gathered transformed the room into a veritable museum.

He played no instrument, but in a corner stood a magnificent piano, bare of any ornament; and a Stradivarius reposed in a special cabinet. Few people were asked to play either of those instruments; but to those few Crane listened in silence, and his brief words of thanks showed his real appreciation of music.

He made few friends, not because he hoarded his friendship, but because, even more than most rich men, he had been forced to erect around his real self an almost impenetrable screen.

As for women, Crane frankly avoided them, partly because his greatest interests in life were things in which women had neither interest nor place, but mostly because he had for years been the prime target of the man-hunting debutantes and the matchmaking mothers of three continents.

Dorothy Vaneman, with whom he had become acquainted through his friendship with Seaton, had been admitted to his friendship. Her frank comradeship was a continuing revelation, and it was she who had last played for him.

She and Seaton had been caught near his home by a sudden shower and had dashed in for shelter. While the rain beat outside, Crane had suggested that she pass the time by playing his ‘fiddle.’ Dorothy, a doctor of music and an accomplished violinist, realized with the first sweep of the bow that she was playing an instrument such as she had known only in her dreams, and promptly forgot everything else. She forgot the rain, the listeners, the time and the place; she simply poured into that wonderful violin everything she had of beauty, of tenderness, of artistry.

Sure, true, and full, the tones filled the big room, and in Crane’s vision there rose a home filled with happy work, with laughter and comradeship. Sensing the girl’s dreams as the music filled his ears, he realized as never before in his busy and purposeful life what a home with the right woman could be like. No thought of love for Dorothy entered his mind – he knew that the love existing between her and Dick was of the sort that only death could alter – but he knew that she had unwittingly given him a great gift. Often thereafter in his lonely hours he saw that dream home, and knew that nothing less than its realization would ever satisfy him.

Returning to his boarding house, Seaton undressed and went to bed,
but not to sleep. He knew that he had seen what could very well become a workable space-drive that afternoon … After an hour of trying to force himself to Sleep he gave up, went to his desk, and started to study. The more he studied, the more strongly convinced he became that his first thought was right – the thing
could
become a space-drive.

By breakfast time he had the beginnings of a tentative theory roughed out, and also had gained some idea of the nature and magnitude of the obstacles to overcome.

Arriving at the Laboratory, he found that Scott had spread the news of his adventure, and his room was soon the center of interest. He described what he had seen and done to the impromptu assembly of scientists, and was starting in on the explanation he had deduced when he was interrupted by Ferdinand Scott.

‘Quick, Dr Watson, the needle!’ he exclaimed. Seizing a huge pipette from a rack, he went through the motions of injecting its contents into Seaton’s arm.

‘It
does
sound like a combination of science-fiction and Sherlock Holmes,’ one of the visitors remarked.

‘“Nobody Holme,” you mean,’ Scott said, and a general chorus of friendly but skeptical jibes followed.

‘Wait a minute, you hidebound dopes, and I’ll
show
you!’ Seaton snapped. He dipped a short piece of copper wire into his solution.

It did not turn brown; and when he touched it with his conductors, nothing happened. The group melted away. As they left, some of the men maintained a pitying silence, but Seaton heard one half-smothered chuckle and several remarks about ‘cracking under the strain.’

Bitterly humiliated at the failure of his demonstration, Seaton scowled morosely at the offending wire. Why should the thing work twice yesterday and not even once today? He reviewed his theory and could find no flaw in it. There must have been something going last night that wasn’t going now … something capable of affecting ultra-fine structure … It had to be either in the room or very close by … and no ordinary generator or X-ray machine could possibly have had any effect …

There was one possibility – only one. The machine in DuQuesne’s room next to his own, the machine he himself had, every once in a while, helped rebuild.

It was not a cyclotron, not a betatron. In
fact, it had as yet no official name. Unofficially, it was the ‘whatsitron,’ or the ‘maybetron,’ or the ‘itaintsotron’ or any one of many less descriptive and more profane titles which he, DuQuesne, and the other researchers used among themselves. It did not take up much room. It did not weigh ten thousand tons. It did not require a million kilowatts of power. Nevertheless it was – theoretically– capable of affecting super-fine structure.

But in the next room? Seaton doubted it.

However, there was nothing else, and it
had
been running the night before – its glare was unique and unmistakable. Knowing that DuQuesne would turn his machine on very shortly, Seaton sat in suspense, staring at the wire. Suddenly the subdued reflection of the familiar glare appeared on the wall outside his door – and simultaneously the treated wire turned brown.

Heaving a profound sigh of relief, Seaton again touched the bit of metal with the wires from the Redeker cell. It disappeared simultaneously with a high whining sound.

Seaton started for the door, to call his neighbors in for another demonstration, but in mid-stride changed his mind. He wouldn’t tell anybody anything until he knew something about the thing himself. He had to find out what it was, what it did, how and why it did it, and how – or if – it could be controlled. That meant time, apparatus and, above all, money. Money meant Crane; and Mart would be interested, anyway.

Seaton made out a leave slip for the rest of the day, and was soon piloting his motorcycle out Connecticut Avenue and into Crane’s private drive. Swinging under the imposing porte-cochère he jammed on his brakes and stopped in a shower of gravel, a perilous two inches from granite. He dashed up the steps and held his finger firmly against the bell button. The door was opened hastily by Crane’s Japanese servant, whose face lit up on seeing the visitor.

‘Hello, Shiro. Is the honorable son of Heaven up yet?’ ‘Yes, sir, but he is at present in his bath.’

‘Tell him to snap it up, please. Tell him I’ve got a thing on the fire that’ll break him right off at the ankles.’

Bowing the guest to a chair in the library, Shiro hurried away. Returning shortly, he placed before Seaton the
Post,
the
Herald,
and a jar of Seaton’s favorite brand of tobacco, and said, with his unfailing bow, ‘Mr Crane will appear in less than one moment, sir.’

Seaton filled and lit his briar and paced up and down the room, smoking furiously. In a short time Crane came in.

‘Good morning, Dick.’ The men shook hands cordially. ‘Your message was slightly garbled in transmission. Something about a fire and ankles is all that came through. What fire? And whose ankles were – or are about to be – broken?’

Seaton repeated.

‘Ah, yes, I thought it must have been something like that. While
I have breakfast, will you have lunch?’

‘Thanks, Mart, guess I will. I was too excited to eat much of anything this morning.’ A table appeared and the two men sat down at it. ‘I’ll just spring it on you cold, I guess. Just what would you think of working with me on a widget to liberate and control the entire constituent energy of metallic copper? Not in little dribbles and drabbles, like fission or fusion, but one hundred point zero zero zero zero per cent conversion? No radiation, no residue, no by-products – which means no shielding or protection would be necessary – just pure and total conversion of matter to controllable energy?’